Many managers and consultants wish to assess knowledge worker productivity within an organization or other knowledge worker community. It is often desirable to assess knowledge worker productivity by comparing data associated with knowledge workers from one knowledge worker community to benchmark data associated with knowledge workers from the same or different knowledge worker communities. For example, a series of such comparisons might be performed to assess knowledge worker productivity within an organization, relative to other organizations, according to various productivity formulations.
As knowledge worker environments become larger and more complex to serve a variety of tasks and information requirements, managers and consultants may desire to assess knowledge worker productivity using various productivity assessment techniques. A known technique for assessing worker productivity measures worker output for a selected time period. Although this technique may be acceptable for worker communities for which worker output is readily susceptible to quantitative measurement, as within most manufacturing environments, such techniques may not be suitable for environments in which the primary function of workers involves obtaining, manipulating, adding value to, and acting on information.